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The Almighty Buck

RIAA Paid $16M+ In Legal Fees To Collect $391K 387

Posted by kdawson from the world's-smartest-executives dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a rare outburst of subjectivity, I commenced my blog post 'Ha ha ha ha ha' when reporting that, based upon the RIAA's disclosure form for 2008, it had paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 to recover $391,000. If they were doing it to 'send a message,' the messages have been received loud & clear: (1) the big four record labels are managed by idiots; (2) the RIAA's law firms have as much compassion for their client as they do for the lawsuit victims; (3) suing end users, or alleged end users, is a losing game. I don't know why p2pnet.net begrudges the RIAA's boss his big compensation; he did a good job... for the lawyers."
Piracy

Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy? 1115

Posted by kdawson from the show-your-work dept.
Andorin writes "Anyone familiar with the piracy debate knows about the claims from organizations like the RIAA that piracy causes billions of dollars in damages and costs thousands of jobs. Other studies have concluded differently, ranging from finding practically no damages to a newer study that cites 'up to 20%' as a more accurate number (PDF). I figure there's got to be an easier way to do this, so here's my question: Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy? The emphasis on 'provably' is important, as some form of evidence is necessary. Accurately and precisely quantifying damages from p2p is impossibly hard, of course, but answering questions like this may lead us to a clearer picture of just how harmful file sharing really is. I would think that if piracy does cause some amount of substantial harm, we would see that fact reflected in our creative works, but I've never heard of a work that tanked because people shared it online."
Privacy

Internet Censorship Arms Race Gets New Weapon From Georgia Tech 75

Posted by timothy from the encode-it-in-your-drawlings dept.
coondoggie writes "Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr. Researchers with the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science will demo the technology known as Collage for the first time at next month's Usenix security conference and ideally have a working package the public can download by the end of August."

Comment Citation needed. (Score 2, Insightful) 409

by bbqsrc (#32809978) Attached to: Copyright As Weapon In US Senate Campaign
Why not just copy and paste selective remarks from the page in question, cite them correctly and be done with it, as I'm sure that would get across the whole point in the first place.

Yes, copyright is fucked, but I think it would be more fun to do both things at the same time. The thing they can't stop and the thing they can, so even if they win, all that happens is the Streisand Effect.
News

EU Plans To Make Apple, Adobe and Others Open Up 389

Posted by CmdrTaco from the jaws-of-life dept.
FlorianMueller writes "After pursuing Microsoft and Intel, European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes is now preparing an initiative that could have an even greater impact on the IT industry: a European interoperability law that will affect not only companies found dominant in a market but all 'significant' players. In a recent interview, Mrs. Kroes mentioned Apple. Nokia, RIM and Adobe would be other examples. All significant market players would have to provide access to interfaces and data formats, with pricing constraints considered 'likely' by the commissioner. Her objective: 'Any kind of IT product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the future.' The process may take a few years, but key decisions on the substance of the bill may already be made later this year."

Comment Ha. (Score 5, Interesting) 335

by bbqsrc (#32742732) Attached to: ASCAP War On Free Culture Escalates
It gives me great pleasure when these things escalate, because the more they escalate, the higher chance the media may accidentally make these arguments mainstream, and people might actually wake up and notice how flawed the system currently is.
Australia

Australia Gets Its First Female Prime Minister 419

Posted by samzenpus from the sheila-in-chief dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed to the Labor leadership, seizing power in a bloodless Parliament House coup after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decided not to contest this morning's leadership ballot. Ms. Gillard will now be sworn in as Australia's first female prime minister. Emerging from this morning's meeting, she said she felt 'very honored' and said she would be making a statement shortly. Treasurer Wayne Swan now steps up as deputy prime minister. He was also elected unopposed."

Comment FUD. (Score 4, Interesting) 120

by bbqsrc (#32633002) Attached to: AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra
NBN is a private company funded by the government for now. Once it's up and running, the government will cut and run like with everything else. Trust me, this has very little to do with censorship.

For anyone truly concerned, they never tested any of their ISP-level filtering shit on the fibre networks, because they know it'll fuck up under that load. If anything, the NBN will make any further censorship proposals go away... for now.

Comment 4GB? (Score 1, Funny) 224

by bbqsrc (#32323064) Attached to: Seagate Launches Hybrid SSD Hard Drive
4GB is very restrictive. I had the first EeePC, the 701, with the 4GB SSD. Talk about micromanage the OS... You can't even install Windows 7 onto the 4GB SSD and put the rest of your data on the HDD, as it's too small! What's the point?

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